A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (42 page)

Cage had scratched out the outlines of a best man speech during the hectic afternoon, and after the ceremony he lifted his glass and praised the heroic host and hostess, and predicted for the bride and groom a lifetime of laughter and shared confidences and interests. We could only now begin to envision, he said, the extraordinary children they would have, the bright and happy home they would create, the vaulting leaps they would make together in forging the future of Illinois, and perhaps—if Lincoln were to follow the Whig road blazed by John Stuart to the United States Congress—the future of the nation itself.

There were more toasts—by Sim Francis, by Ned Baker, by Ash Merritt, by Billy Herndon, even a not-so-grudging welcome-to-the-family from Ninian Edwards. But there was no music and no dancing and by nine o'clock the guests were standing outside the steps of the mansion with handfuls of rice. Before she entered the carriage with her new husband, Mary turned and kissed Cage on the cheek.

“You are such a friend of Mr. Lincoln,” she said, her pronunciation of the word “mister” somehow driving home the fact that he was now in her possession and would remain so. “And you are of course a great friend to me. I hope you always will be.”

“Of course I will,” he said.

Lincoln was beside her. He saw her into the carriage and then grabbed Cage's hand and squeezed it hard and gave him a relieved smile.

“Well, Cage,” he said. “I am married, after all.”

“Yes, you are. And God bless you.”

Lincoln kept his grip on Cage's hand for a moment more.

“I feel pretty good about it,” he said. “I really do.”

S
OMETHING WAS WRONG.
Nothing specific, nothing tragic
,
just a needling sense that the world and everyone in it were moving forward without him. It had started with Lincoln's marriage in November. Maybe the foundation of Cage's mortal caution about the arrangement had been nothing but simple envy—or annoyance. Lincoln had all but disappeared from Cage's life these last few months. He was reportedly happy, happier than anyone had expected him to be after such a tormented courtship and thrown-together wedding, but Cage had learned nothing from Lincoln himself. He understood that a newly married man would necessarily divest himself of old habits and, to one degree or another, old friends. Still, the fact that Lincoln had not called on him or written to him, had not chosen to share the impressions and emotions of his new state, was an unexpected wound.

Equally unexpected was the parcel that arrived from Gray and Bowen just after the new year. The manuscript of
The Prairie Road
had gone out to them in early November. He had waited anxiously since for the letter confirming that they had read it and were eager to publish it. Instead they had returned the book with only a brief note:

Thank you for the submission to our house of the enclosed manuscript, bearing the title The Prairie Road. We have read it and believe the poetical work does its author much credit, in both topic and execution. We note particularly your feel for the landscape of the western regions and for the inhabitants therein. But we fear that it may be only of provincial interest, as several of our readers here have found. We regret the necessity of returning it to you without an offer of publication.

At moments of profound disappointment a man ought to turn to his wife or his closest friend. But Cage had no wife—only Ellie, who by nature would be unable to comprehend how a letter such as this could devastate his soul. As for his closest friend, he was married and living with his new wife in a room at the Globe, and except for a few chance encounters on the street, had mysteriously removed himself from Cage's orbit.

None of it made any sense. Gray and Bowen's original interest in the manuscript, once Mary Todd had managed to alert them to it, had been keen. His belief in the quality of the work itself, which had been wrought from his own heart, and perfected over a period of many years, was secure. The perfunctory rejection was as confusing as it was disheartening. He was of course too proud to approach Mary Todd—now Mrs. Abraham Lincoln—to get her opinion of what had gone wrong or whether some kind of mistake had been made. He was likewise too proud to search out Lincoln himself, to present himself to his preoccupied friend as someone in need of consolation and encouragement. He would have to suffer the blow in solitude.

He could not bear to even look at the manuscript, fearing that if he did so he might share the opinion of Gray and Bowen's office readers that it was a provincial mediocrity and no more. He locked it away in a desk drawer and resolved not to think about it until his disappointment and anger had cooled. At that point he would read it over again and, if necessary, admit that the identity he had created for himself as a man of letters had been an illusion all along.

Just when he had decided that his friendship with Abraham Lincoln had been an illusion as well, an invitation arrived, signed “Mary Lincoln,” soliciting Cage's attendance at a thirty-fourth birthday celebration for her husband to be held that next week in the sitting room of the Globe Hotel.

There was no personal inscription from Mary, no “We are so looking forward to seeing you again after such an inexplicably long time apart.” The note was rather formal, hinting at a formal occasion, and so Cage polished his boots and dressed in his best coat and best silk tie before striding off to the Globe in the dark and sleety cold of a February evening.

The sitting room was already crowded when he got there. All of the members of the old coterie and of the poetry society and of course the politicos and lawyers with whom Lincoln's life intersected at every turn. There was a table in the middle of the room with a great frosted sponge cake with gilded leaves around the edge and the initials “A.L.” in the center. There were ham and turkey and free drinks at the bar. Who was paying for all this? Perhaps Mary's father, or one of her uncles. Or maybe the celebration was a function of the Whig Party, which was becoming more structured, taking on a clear hierarchy and meeting in conventions to choose its candidates. The other possibility was a simple levy among Lincoln's friends, though if that were the case why hadn't Cage been asked to contribute?

Lincoln spotted him almost as soon as he entered the door, immediately detached himself from the well-wishers he was talking to, and rushed over to pump his hand up and down.

“For God's sake, Cage, where have you been? Do you have any idea how much I've missed talking to you?”

“I've been where I've always been. You're the one who's fallen off the rim of the earth.”

“Well, it's my fault then, I guess. Once you get married, your life starts to move on rails and you're miles off from where you started before you know it. There's a lot of fuss involved when you move to a new place with a woman. Did you know it's not just desirable but essential to have ormolu tiebacks for your window drapes?”

“Are you happy?”

“It's a marvel to me, Cage—being married. Some would say we're in a tight space, since we only have one room. And Molly—Mrs. Lincoln, as we call her now—has to do all the cleaning and housekeeping herself, which she's not used to, being a Kentucky Todd. But she's got a smile on her face most of the time and when she doesn't I've learned the art of staying out of her way. By the bye, I'm holding on to a secret that's about to—”

But Logan was calling out Lincoln's name, ordering him to by God come over by the fireplace and let the workies of the party serenade him on his birthday. They sang one rousing Whig song and then another, and would have kept going all night if Mary Lincoln, knife in hand, had not called out for silence and said it was time to cut her husband's birthday cake.

Cage had not yet had the chance to speak to her. The room was crowded, the conversation chaotic. Everyone was talking about Joseph Smith and whether the Mormon prophet had really conspired to kill the former governor of Missouri. They were gossiping about the upcoming race for U.S. Congress and whether Lincoln, Baker, and Hardin would, as seemed likely, all join in the scramble for the Whig nomination for the Seventh District.

Ned Baker did not look like a man who was preparing to challenge his good friend Abraham Lincoln. He was heaving with laughter at one of Lincoln's stories as if he hadn't heard it a dozen times before. He laughed so hard he started to choke on his cake, crumbs flying out of his mouth as Lincoln pounded him on the back. For just a moment it looked as if Ned was in real trouble, but he soon recovered himself enough to set down his empty cake plate and pick up another.

Baker and Lincoln and Ash Merritt and Logan and Billy Herndon were all standing in front of the fireplace, where big oak logs were fiercely aflame, filling that portion of the room with a surging light that made the men, with their animated, illuminated gesturing, look like actors before the footlights. The chair Jacob Early had been sitting in before Truett shot him was no longer there, and the carpet that had soaked up his blood had been replaced, but to Cage this room would forever bring to his mind nothing but the shocking crime he had witnessed with Jim Reed.

Billy Herndon was drunk and getting drunker. He had arrived without the temporizing presence of his wife, who was at home with one child and expecting another.

“Let me tell you a little something about John Hardin,” Billy said when he had left the group by the fire and cornered Cage. He seemed to be under the impression they were taking up a conversation that had just been interrupted. “Yes, he's loyal to the party but he's loyal to himself first. His ambition is celestial, and he has not much more regard for the truth than Munchausen himself.”

“Why are you going on about John Hardin?”

“Because it's Mr. Lincoln who should represent this district in Washington, and not anybody else. Hardin and Ned Baker should both have the decency to get out of the way.”

Billy had begun studying law with Lincoln last year. Since he was the sort of man who was driven to take sides on things, it was natural he would be outraged at any threat to his patron's interests. Cage had no illusions that either Hardin or Baker would step aside for Lincoln, or that Lincoln would do the same for them. All three were friends of his, and he knew them well enough to understand that each was jealously convinced of his own destiny and more than willing to fight for it.

“She's looking at me again,” Billy said. He had changed the subject so rapidly that Cage had no idea what he was talking about.

“Who's looking at you?”

Billy was staring abashedly down at his feet now but he made a slight gesture with his beer glass toward the other side of the room. Cage looked up and caught Mary Lincoln's disapproving stare an instant before she realized it had been noticed. Her countenance shifted so fast—she was laughing now about something with her friend Mercy—that Cage wasn't sure if the angry flash in her eyes had not been an illusion.

“She doesn't like me,” Billy said. “She doesn't like me and she doesn't trust me around her noble husband.”

“She told you that?”

“She won't tell me that or anything else. She won't look at me except to stare a hole through me. I drink with too much robustity—I'm pretty sure that's her problem. Her husband's a temperance man but he doesn't make himself the judge of the world when it comes to other people's enjoyments.”

He leaned closer to Cage and whispered sloppily into his ear. “I liked things better when Mr. Lincoln wasn't married. He thinks he's happy with her but he is caged with her now and there's an awful long term ahead.”

Billy was tiresomely drunk and Cage was disposed to ignore his indictment of Mary Lincoln. She was right to glare at him as much as she wished if she felt his conduct showed any risk of undermining her husband's hard-won stature in Illinois. But when he finally made it across the room to have a conversation with Mary for the first time that evening he faced something unexpected. She held out her hand and she smiled and greeted him by name but there was a strange hardness behind her eyes and a flatness in her voice.

“So glad you could come,” she said as if to a stranger, “to help us celebrate Mr. Lincoln's birthday.”

He laughed, assuming her distant tone was some sort of private interplay between two friends who knew each other very well. But her formal smile lingered and there was no warmth in her eyes. He asked her, stumblingly, how she enjoyed her new life at the Globe.

“Very well, thank you. We only have one room, of course, and no one to help with housekeeping. So I'm afraid my domestic skills are constantly being put to the test, but we're very happy indeed. How are you, Cage?”

How are you, Cage? At least she was still using his first name, but she deployed it with such an emotional remove that it could almost have been a taunt. He was thoroughly confused. Yes, he had been cautious about her, especially when it came to her paralyzing effects on Lincoln, but their conversations in the past had never lacked in frankness or warmth.

She looked well, a little stouter than she had been at her wedding, her face full but the skin taut across her cheekbones, flush with health and—he supposed—contentment. But it was a private contentment she had no interest in sharing with him, the man she had more than once singled out as a confidant.

“And your book?” she said. “Is it finished?”

“Finished, yes. Finished and forgotten, I'm afraid.”